


All The Awful Dreams

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Resplendence [9]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-07 17:18:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15224003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: It comes down to this: in the end, we are only what others remember of us.(Eames is still gone. Only now, everything’s changed.)





	All The Awful Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Hullo darlings,
> 
> Yes, I’m back. With news.
> 
>  
> 
> **This is probably my last Resplendence story.**
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you so bloody much to EVERYBODY who has followed this series. Thanks for your kudos and your reviews and your love. I might yet dream up more the revisit - there are a few ideas written in capitals letters in notes on my phone, but they’re all very wishy washy - so for now I’m going to give this grieving Arthur some rest. He deserves some peace.
> 
> I just want to also give a little (and proud) shoutout to Jester85, who saw this one coming a mile away. You’re right, the bell tolls indeed. Well, kind of…
> 
> WARNINGS include reference to non-con, which yes are partly in the sexual sense (not in detail) but I think this is also suitable when discussing dream-share, in the sense of interfering with a person’s subconscious without their consent. I don’t think you can actually call violating a person’s mind any better than violating their body. (This is something that worries me a lot when writing fics for inception, because I inherently disagree with the morals of it so totally.)
> 
> There’s also some flippant disregard for sacred Ancient Greek temples and Christianity, which I apologise for.
> 
> If you’ve enjoyed these stories, I have a few others on the go that I’m going to hopefully dedicate more time to now, so please check them out. You’re basically guaranteed a lot of angst and adoration.
> 
> I’ve also totally given up on trying to figure out if these make sense as standalones, so for any newcomers, I advise you go back to Heaven’s Weight and start from there. At the very least you need to read From Which Light Has Sprung in order for this to make sense.
> 
> It’s been wild, dolls. Your kindness is overwhelming. Please leave a review. (And try not to hate me too much.)
> 
> With Love,
> 
> LRCx

.

.

Ideas are resilient parasites.

Arthur has always known this, long before he found out how to steal them.

Long before his name was Arthur at all.  
.

.

On a Sunday afternoon, a boy called Daniel Palmer holds his little sister’s hand very tight and stares at the coffin containing the smashed up dead body that probably doesn’t even look much like his mother anymore.

Daniel isn’t supposed to know that, but his dad’s been so distracted and Daniel, his curiosity’s always been cat-killer strong. Plus, he never told his parents how their voices carried up the stairs through the landing if he sat  _just so_ at the top of the staircase.

He looks at the wooden box, at the gold buckle ornamentations and the unstable looking legs holding it up. He’s so close, he could probably touch it if he extended his arm all the way out to the side, leaned just a little into his right foot.

The church smells of incense, of dusty paintings and old wood.

Daniel doesn’t like this church, doesn’t like  _any_ church. His mom used to call churches afterlife wishing wells.

He thinks maybe she would hate this, and that maybe his dad should know that.

And he starts to wonder, well, are they  _sure_ it’s his mom in there at all?

If the body really is that messy, they probably can’t be sure. Test results, they can be faked, right?

He thinks about the stash of comic books in the boxes under his bed, about all the movies that start with a death that isn’t really a death at all, and he thinks, maybe it’s all part of something much bigger.

Maybe his mom is just pretending. Maybe she’s a spy undercover, maybe this is all some big ploy to keep her family safe.

Daniel idles his way through several versions of this idea while the priest talks about eternal rest in God’s arms.

If Daniel’s mom is a spy, she’s probably not resting.

His dad is crying and his sister is squeezing his fingers horribly tight.

Daniel looks at the coffin with hard, calculating eyes.

It’s awful small, really. His mom’s taller than that, isn’t she?

He’s sure she’s taller than that. She can’t possibly be in there because  _it’s too short._

At this realisation, something hot and vibrant blooms in his chest.

 _You’re so smart,_ his mom would say when he showed her his science homework and she’d kiss his head. She knew he was smart, knew he’d figure it out.

Daniel jitters where he stands in the front pew and a tiny creeping smile breaks through his frown.

His mom isn’t  _dead._ His mom is  _alive._

.

.

Ideas; it’s not just their resilience that makes them parasites.

It’s the way they keep sucking the life out of a person, even once there’s nothing left to take.

.

.

_(For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.)_

.

.

The memory creeps around his periphery for weeks, maybe even months.

He knows something is  _wrong._ He knows something is  _false,_ is  _gone,_ is  _unnatural._

Then, on a night of electricity, dry cracks of light in a thundery sky, Robert Fischer wakes up in a flash of remembrance so sudden, he cries out into the cushion soft of the bedroom as he wakes.

He sits up, sweat at his temples, his nape, his back. The muggy air leaking in through the open window slaps him hard and he shivers.

“Sweetheart?”

Melissa sits up, too. Bleary eyed, already alert.

This isn’t his first nightmare this week.

She has an early start tomorrow, but she sits up anyway, one hand rubbing her eyes and the other cool in the centre of his back, helping him catch his breath.

Robert is mostly certain he doesn’t deserve Melissa. Her attentive patience and her strange ability to always know exactly how much distance he needs, her willingness to  _give_ it, too.

She kisses his bare shoulder, once, twice.

Out of the corner of his eye, the red of her strawberry blonde hair splashes colour through the dark.

He reaches out to run his fingers through it, presses kisses into her head behind her ear. She smells of pillows and shampoo and very faintly of perfume, despite the lengthy shower she had before coming to bed.

“You ok?” she murmurs, tilting into his kiss with that catlike squirm of hers that makes him spider around her, just to feel her weight in his grasp.

He’s not ready to speak, not yet. She must sense it, mystical creature that she is, because she doesn’t ask again.

It’s been over a year and he’s still not used to it, to that level of care that comes to her so naturally.

Melissa comes from a big family and Robert had thought that was the difference at first. It’s not that she has a lot of siblings and cousins, though. It’s that they’re all so close.

Robert Fischer is getting used to closeness. Slowly, shyly, he is learning to rely on it.  
Melissa is bafflingly patient.

As they lie back, sinking into the pillows, she nuzzles his throat.

“It was just a dream,” she whispers soothingly in her cottony voice, and oh, if only she knew how appropriate that is.

He kisses her head again, trailing the pads of his fingers over the gooseflesh of her arm, sweat sticking them together uncomfortably.

She mustn’t mind, though, because she drifts back to sleep less than ten minutes later.

Robert stares up at the ceiling, fighting to reclaim the bits and pieces of the face in his dream.

 _Just a dream,_ yes, but also it  _wasn’t,_ was it?

He knows that face. Jumbled up jigsaw in his head through scaly layers of grief and stress and pit-stomach rage that belies all that disappointment in his gut. He remembers.

He’s awake when Melissa’s alarm goes off, more than three hours later.

.

.

 _What do you have for me today, Miss Daler?_ Maurice Fischer used to ask every morning.

Robert would try very hard to keep his eyes on his own work, or on his father. Invariably they’d drift, of course. Drift with the tide of his desire all the way to Melissa Daler, her freckly complexion and her scrunchies and that silver pendant she wore every day.

“Your dad’s secretary?” Josh teases him when he realises as they leave the office one day.

Robert shoves him only half playfully in embarrassment.

“Isn’t she like, eighteen?” Josh scoffs and then Robert really does shove him, hard, despite being in a small elevator.

“She’s twenty-two,” he says. “Five years is hardly a generational gap.”

He knows, though, that Josh is right. Her age isn’t the actual issue.

At the end of the day, twenty-two or thirty-two, despite any gentle smiles she might offer him when he dares make eye contact, Josh is right. She isn’t just Melissa, or Miss Daler, or the lovely redhead who can do math calculations in her head that Robert can barely do on a calculator; she’s his _dad’s secretary._

So he keeps his eyes on his work and he pretends he doesn’t know who always refills his coffee for him when he isn’t looking.

.

.

Robert thinks, maybe, he’s the worst kind of coward.

.

.

Maurice Fischer takes a long time to die.

His stubbornness, genetically coded into his DNA along with a short fuse temper and an incapacity for positive emotional displays, tethers him to the world for months, when weeks would surely have been kinder for everyone, including himself.

It’s more difficult to watch his father deteriorate than Robert thought it would be.

As a sullen teenager, he’d imagined a thousand ways he might cut down the towering overlord of his father’s arrogance, whose shadow he had suffocated in so acutely.

Seeing Maurice stripped down so cruelly by illness though, it’s unprecedented. Robert’s self-horror at ever wishing suffering upon his father is absolute.

How many times growing up did he imagine his father in a car accident? A plane crash? How many times did he pray for some great intervention that would leave Robert in the care of his Uncle Peter?

He can scarcely believe he once harboured so much hatred towards the man, now sickly and trembling in the bedsheets of indignity.

Robert blinks away the dry sting of his eyes.

“Mr Fischer?” a voice says, and he flinches, because that’s not him, it can’t be him, not the name he once coveted, jealous schoolboy with red letters on the tops of his exams.

He turns, startled to find himself standing in an empty boardroom.

“Melissa, hi, umm, sorry, Miss Daler-” he stammers around her name awkwardly, blushing when she laughs.

It’s not a cruel laugh. It’s warm, and Robert, he can’t help but bask in it.

“Melissa’s fine,” she says.

She’s said it before.

“And I’m just Robert,” he reminds her, too.

“Robert,” she repeats, still smiling, and the  _t_ is lost in the cotton murmur of her accent, just like every other time she’s ever said his name before.

There’s no pity in her eyes and he tells himself that’s why he likes the way she looks at him.

She’s not his father’s secretary anymore. She hasn’t been for a few years, now.

She still wears those scrunchies though, and that pendant that’s glued around her neck.

It’s a dull engraved silver and when he realises he’s staring at it, he flails a little, body and mouth.

“I just - you - so - I-”

Melissa, however, doesn’t require an explanation, or an apology. She toys with the pendant in a practised, absent move.

“An heirloom from my grandmother,” she says. “We were very close.”

Robert catches her eyes then, a quirk in his mouth and Melissa’s entire expression melts into wide eyed horror.

“Oh - shit - I mean - shit - sorry - I didn’t -”

She shuts her mouth tight, with a hand over her lips, looking mortified.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, and Robert lets out a weak laugh.

“It’s really fine,” he says, strangely relieved in a way.

People don’t talk about Robert’s uneasy relationship with his father. Not to his face, at least.

It’s refreshing, really, to hear it acknowledged, albeit through muffled, awkward swearing apologies.

“How are you?” Melissa asks, partly to cover up her blunder and partly, he thinks, out of genuine concern.

Robert shrugs one shoulder, unsure how to answer.

He’s reluctant to lie to her, yet it’s not his place to tell the truth. He’s the boss, now, in a stilted, more-than-interim way.

He can’t offload his woes on employees.

It’s that thought that floods bitterness through him like a shiver and he has to look away.

It’s regret, he realises, regret so fierce it tastes like blood in his mouth.

Because asking his father’s secretary out on a date six years ago would have been awkward, maybe a little inappropriate.

But asking his employee on a date now would be a lawsuit in the making.

“I have the Callahan reports here, if you have some time?” Melissa says when his silence drags them deeper into horrid, shy discomfort.

Robert takes the papers she offers and nods.

 _This_ he can do.

 _This_ he can do well.

And it’s perhaps enough of a comfort for now to know that she sees that, that she’s willing to distract him with development reports so he doesn’t have to talk about the ten mile deep well he’s currently spiralling down.

“When do you meet with the lawyers?” he asks, flicking through the data steadily.

She stands beside him, her strawberry blonde hair bright in the corner of his vision.

“The eighteenth,” she says.

Her hand is still fiddling with her pendant. Her eyes are clear, focussed.

In another lifetime, he thinks in the quiet reserves of his busy mind, he could have really loved her.

.

.

Once, Robert flew to New York to meet with a man called Harold Prince.

On paper, Harold Prince is a consultant on legal protection for clean energy contractors with a remit the length and breadth of the Northern Hemisphere.

In practice, he is something quite different. His reach, too, is as wide as the world, or seems as much.

Harold Prince is a man in his fifties, with wiry brown curls and a twitchy mouth. He stares at Robert like he doesn’t even need to ask questions to get answers, which Robert supposes is exactly the case.

Officially, in company records, Robert is here to discuss the new tender for steelworks subsidiaries with Laurence Schultz. And yes, he is. He’ll do that tomorrow.

Today, he’s meeting with Harold Prince. Not even his father knows he’s doing this.

“I’m very glad you took up my invitation. I think you’ll be very pleased with what I have to offer.”

Robert sips his drink and eyes the restaurant at large, the chattering diners and glossy smart staff.

They’re waiting on their main courses, but Robert feels too nervous to be hungry.

“Honestly, Mr Prince, I’m still not sure I understand what it is you’re offering.”

For some reason, this makes Harold Prince toast him with a raised glass.

He’s drinking whisky; the amber glow of his glass catches the light, honey hot.

“Well, young Mr Fischer, allow me to explain.

His ideas, they are radical. They are bizarre.

Robert can barely comprehend them.

For the first time in a long time, maybe in years, Robert Fischer smiles only for himself.

.

.

Four years later, a record of the meeting sits on a desk in a warehouse in Paris, a single straw in the haystack.

There’s no mention of Harold Prince.

.

.

(If there had been, maybe this would all have been very different.)

.

.

(Or, possibly, it would all have been the same.)

.

.

A week after he finds out, Arthur flies to Mombasa.

It’s been a while since he walked on African ground, felt that particular scorch of sun on his face.

He strolls with idle discomfort through the bustle hustle streets. Argues with vendors and hands a fistful of money to a little boy who stares up at him with morose, cavernous eyes, his shaking hands outstretched.

Yusuf’s shop is locked up, shutters down and lights off. It would take a lot more than that put Arthur off on a lazy day, though, and today he is not lazy. He strolls and he loiters and he backtracks, but he isn’t lazy.

He’s never been more motivated than he is right now, in this moment.

There’s a back entrance. It involves some scaling of a wall and an unfortunate incident of shattering a window that startles two stray cats below. They yowl accusatory wails at him as he slides legs first into the dusty storeroom.

Catches his elbow on the crystal cut edge and feels the blood blossom up, leaking down his bare arm in a thin crimson rivulet that congeals quickly.

It’s not that Yusuf’s lax in his security, he thinks to himself as he stares around the clustered room. It’s just that people either think he has nothing worth stealing or know it’s worth more than their life to try.

So Arthur stands patiently in the middle of the room, eyeing the contents on an open box. A jumble of assorted instruments, most of them cracked or non-recyclable.

It takes less than four minutes for the click of the door to unlock and open, revealing a badger faced Yusuf.

“You could have called,” he says.

“You wouldn’t have answered,” Arthur replies, brushing past him and heading straight down the corridor.

He hears Yusuf’s tired little sigh of defeat, followed by, “Kitchen’s third on the left.”

Kitchen is one word for it. Laboratory containing a kettle and toaster is probably more accurate, though.

The air smells alkaline, pinching his nose, and that’s definitely a compound of somnacin in a chipped _I Heart London_ mug on the table, a syringe sticking out of it with a slanting tragedy that makes Arthur scoff.

“I’ve seen healthier looking meth labs,” he says as Yusuf fiddles with the kettle and starts rooting through a cupboard.

Yusuf, however, doesn’t feel the need to defend himself.

Which he shouldn’t, Arthur acknowledges begrudgingly. Yusuf’s not the first man Arthur’s known to make a living on being underestimated.

(It doesn’t hurt the same as it used to, thinking about it. Rather, it does, but Arthur’s skin is a tiny bit thicker now, a little more numb to the red flare of memories.)

“Cobb told you,” Yusuf says brusquely.

He still hasn’t made eye contact, which Arthur thinks is less to do with shame and more a bizarre, shallow courtesy. As if Arthur now carries with him the shrouded burden of the truth, and Yusuf doesn’t want to get caught staring at it.

“When did you find out?” Arthur asks, and the question almost sticks in his throat.

Arthur has no doubt Dom sat on the information for a while before summoning the courage to tell him. He hasn’t decided if he’s angry about that or not, yet.

Yusuf turns his head, and in profile Arthur can see lines around his eyes that weren’t there when they met five years ago. That’s just nature’s gentle toll, though. It’s age and stress and laughter; it’s squinting in the sun without shades and peering at small print in dark labs.

Arthur has aged, too. He feels it in his joints. In his scars stitched to ache and in bruises that take longer to heal now than they did ten years ago.

The kettle hisses. Yusuf drops two teabags into clean mugs and turns, leaning back against the worktop with his arms defensively folded over his chest. He sucks in a breath, puffy cheeked wolf outside a house of sticks, and he says,

“Four months after it happened.”

It punches Arthur square in the chest, deeper and more accurate than any bullet.

He feels every muscle in his face slacken and spasm. His fingernails bite into his palms and his breath is ripped right out of his lungs.

Betrayal, pure and simple.

Arthur opens his mouth but all that comes out is a garble of hurting vowels.

 _Six months ago,_ he’d expected. Maybe, just maybe,  _last year_ at an extreme push.

This? This secret, buried so far from him, hidden for so long?

It burrows into Arthur like an arrowhead. The retrieval as deadly as the blow, leaving behind a bloody, gaping wound.

(A spray of gunfire in a warehouse in Lithuania.)

“Arthur,” Yusuf says and he looks, not ashamed of himself, but certainly uncomfortable and rather as if he’s expecting Arthur to pull a gun on him.

He steps forward and Arthur retreats, the backs of his thighs hitting the table of chemicals with a rattle.

“It’s been  _three years,”_ Arthur says shakily, his weight sinking into the table and his eyes shut tight. There’s a sound rushing through his head that’s an awful lot like bullets crunching bone.

There’s the shaky exhale of disappointed laughter, a wet whisper of  _Should've - years ago -_ like it’s a question that needs answering.

 _“Three years!”_ he roars and he can feel his fingers ripping holes into the palms of his hands.

Yusuf nods mutely because Yusuf, he knows that. He knows how long it’s been but what he doesn’t know, can’t possibly comprehend, is how heavily Arthur’s been carrying those years.

A thousand days of solitude, of filling in the gaps that were so incidental before.

Arthur had had no idea how many seconds of his days were spent fielding spam texts from a bored Eames, how much time he had idled away just _thinking_ about him.

Not until the texts stopped coming, until thinking became too unbearably close to grieving.

Until he found himself lying awake in hotel rooms until the small hours, with a quiet phone and a loud mind, wondering what he used to do to fill his time.

“He said he’d tell you,” Yusuf says, like that makes it any better, like that makes it  _right._

It’s the Fischer Job all over again, so fucking  _literally_ that it takes every ounce of Arthur’s strength not to pick up the nearest beaker of chemicals and lob it at the man. It shouldn’t matter what Dom said or didn’t say. Yusuf’s a grown man and he knew, he knew all this time and he was too much of a coward to tell Arthur himself.

“Did you think you were  _sparing_ me?” he snarls scathingly. He feels incredibly unspared right now, feels attacked and cornered, feels more helpless than he has done in years, than he ever has done before. “Is that how you’ve been justifying yourself this whole time?”

“Oh, come off it, Arthur,” Yusuf says, louder than Arthur expects. He even swats the air like he’s brushing Arthur off, only his eyes remain fixed on Arthur’s face, his scowl the stone of Medusa. “You’re not angry at  _me._ You’re not even angry at  _Cobb._ You’re angry at Eames for not telling you about it in the first place, so don’t come in here all guns blazing trying to-”

The air disappears from the room like a vacuum.

One minute, Arthur is standing with his fists fight-spoil ready, and the next the entire world reduces to a single, blistering sentence.

“What do you mean, he didn’t tell me?”

The bloody flush of Yusuf’s cheeks drains away to a sickly sheen.

Horror stricken, now he looks ashamed. Now he looks guilty.

Arthur feels the strength go out of his knees, the stomach swoop of a dream kicked into nothingness.

His head cracks on the corner of the table as he hits the ground.

.

.

 _I think someone's trying to kill me,_ Eames told him.

But Eames was prone to exaggeration, so he didn't think anything of it.

 _Someone is always trying to kill you,_ Yusuf replied flippantly.

.

.

They met, not by happenstance, but as fixer and fix.

One with clean needles and the other, a blade notched with kills.

They were allies, and then, more.

.

.

Yusuf hears about it from Mandy the Thief.

She comes to the shop, which she hasn’t done for months because she hates anything hotter than thirty degrees celsius.

(Hates anything colder than twenty, as well.)

She shows up out of the blue. Early morning, when the dreamers are just settling.

Yusuf hears the jangle of the shop door and he shouts,  _Thirty seconds!_

Walks into the main floor twenty-eight seconds later to find her kissing Jam, his ageing tabby cat.

Mandy looks up when he enters, her fingers still buried in Jam’s scruff.

She’s sweating profusely, looks angry and impatient with a crease in her forehead and her lips tight.

“Mandy,” he says, shocked but pleased, because he’s always liked her.

He always likes it when tokens of long abandoned England walk into his shop, relics of nostalgia and other lives lived.

“Yusuf,” she says, her voice brittle, sharded.

She’s wearing a thin jumper and a long skirt. Sandals and painted toenails and very long, loose hair the colour of milky coffee.

Just like every time, these sporadic visits she gifts him with, Yusuf is momentarily distracted by how beautiful he has always found her, indulges in one glance at her lips before the words that fall out of them strike him hard in the gut.

“Eames is dead,” she says.

Says it like a secret she’s been keeping inside her mouth too long, is banishing it from her tongue before it can burn holes in her teeth.

Yusuf blinks steadily, confused.

“I spoke to him a few weeks ago,” he says, as if to prove her wrong.

“It happened eight days ago,” she shrugs. “I know you were friends.”

Friends is, of course, a very relative term. A loose one, even, among criminals.

Yusuf has  _friends_ that he will advise in chemical matters.

He has friends he’ll do deals for, friends he will lie for and friends he will tell the truth for.

Mandy is a friend he will tentatively do favours for, that MOU of somnacin blends and sentiment.

Eames, though. Eames is a friend that has sneakily climbed the rungs of the ladder of Yusuf’s trust and the idea that he is gone, well. It is an unnameable thing, to lose a friend like that.

“How?” he asks when the elastic silence is stretched too taut to bear.

“Gunned down in North Europe somewhere, according to Warbreck.”

Yusuf makes a scoffing sound in his throat, too dry, and he coughs. With hoarse disbelief he asks,

“And how does Warbreck know that?”

Mandy gives him a gummy soft look, the corners of her kissable lips sucked in, so that dimples appear in her cheeks.

“Arthur’s gone off the radar,” she says, as if that’s an answer.

“Maybe he’s dead, too,” Yusuf suggests and he aims for facetious but it comes up so incredibly short.

Mandy looks down at Jam, his squashed face tilted up and she kisses his whiskers again, wrinkling her nose when he twitches his front paws around her hand.

Yusuf sinks down into the chair near the counter, feels the sagging of acceptance in his bones.

“So, they  _were_ fucking,” Mandy says, sounding curious and satisfied and ever so slightly sad.

Yusuf chuffs a laugh. He honestly doesn’t know.

He always suspected Eames’ jibes about Arthur were hot air at best, that his razor tooth grin was a mask concealing something much more important than petty rivalry, or a fanciful crush.

He doesn’t  _know_ though. And he won’t know for certain for another month, not until a ragged boned Arthur shows up on his doorstep asking for a new PASIV because his old one was smashed up in Lithuania.

Mandy makes tea, moving about his kitchen with easy familiarity. He’s glad she’s here, with her Hertfordshire voice and her Devonshire slang.

They toast the dead in a  _clink_ of cups and Yusuf wonders, has anyone called Cobb?

.

.

And then a month later, the cat-hiss, feather-spit rage of an aimless Point Man. They go down two levels into his head, just to be sure, just to clear Yusuf’s duck-back conscience of any water.

Yusuf is certain Arthur had no idea that all the road signs in his mind led to one word, over and over again.

.

.

(Yusuf had never known his real name was William.)

.

.

_(I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see.)_

.

.

 _I’m sorry there’s nothing else I can do,_ Ariadne says, in Paris, in the twinkle of night, made brave by alcohol and victory, her hand on Arthur’s taut forearm.

And this, too:

_Eames wouldn’t want you to be alone._

.

.

(It doesn’t matter what Eames would want.)

.

.

(And in any case, Eames spent eight years of his life trying to stop Arthur turning his back on him. So actually, she’s wrong. This is exactly what Eames would have wanted.)

.

.

Dom calls every number he’s ever had for Arthur.

He’s loath to call anyone else just yet, knows that however necessary it was, Arthur still didn’t appreciate him showing up in Marrakech after going through Saito for help.

Only, it’s  _Arthur._

Dom knows he hasn’t always done right by him. He’s taken him for granted and laid more on his shoulders than was ever his right to and he knows, knows it isn’t his right to demand anything of Arthur now, either.

All he sees, though, is Mal’s soft grin as she pointed at Arthur’s retreating back, the first time, and mouthed,  _I like that one._

Dom’s not proud of how he’s handled this. He knows Arthur deserved better than a guilt-ridden phone call from the other side of the world, dropping an anvil of truth so heavy Dom was surprised he could get the words out at all.

It all started with Philippa finding a stack of photos of Mal in a box in the attic when she was looking for her old dance costumes.

There were tears dried with gentle thumbs and terrible questions fielded so badly that Dom could feel himself squirming with thorny self-hatred, even as his daughter gripped him tight around the waist in the longest hug she’s given him in months.

And for the first time, it hadn’t just been Mal who had consumed his thoughts.

_That’s all well and good, Cobb. But if you ever put him in danger like that again, you’ll regret the day you were born._

Dom doubts Arthur knows Eames called him a week after the Fischer Job.

Dom was sure as heck too embarrassed to ever say a word, and Eames, well Eames lied with the kind of elegance that always made Dom’s skin crawl. He probably wouldn’t have even considered it lying to Arthur, would probably have just chalked it up to  _omitting truths._

The thing is, Dom’s spent two and a half years telling himself he’s doing right by Arthur, right by Eames, by not revealing what Yusuf dug up from God knows what back alley.

 _If you ever put him in danger,_ Eames had said, seething through the phone like lava, and Dom knew exactly what Arthur would do with information like that, knew exactly what kind of danger he’d be putting Arthur in by handing him that silver platter of knowledge.

Was it any different, he wonders, to saying it outright?

_Arthur, Eames died because of you._

Maybe not. Still, there's no way Dom could ever have brought himself to say  _that._

In the end, the memory of Mal’s fond laughter crippled his loyalty to a Forger he only sometimes got along with.

So now, he calls every number he’s ever had for Arthur. Wants to apologise, wants to tell him that he’ll help, that he’s not alone, that it wasn’t Arthur’s fault, even if it feels like it right now.

Arthur doesn’t answer.

Every disconnected dial tone stabs further into Dom’s panic, coal in the fire of his fears.

And Arthur, he doesn’t answer.

.

.

Dom thinks there’s a very real chance he’s never going to get an answer from Arthur again.

.

.

_(Into this wild Abyss, The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave.)_

.

.

The phone call happens at night, but also in the daytime.

For Robert Fischer, it is three twenty-one in the morning; the stars are still aggressively bright. For Harold Prince, it is gone midday; he’s eating a bowl of soup with overly buttered granary bread.

Robert Fischer is sitting in his kitchen, having sweatily extracted himself from Melissa post-nightmare. It’s the first time she hasn’t woken up when he does and he feels a burst of guilt.

She’s a light sleeper. If his bellowing hasn’t roused her, it’s because she’s too exhausted to be stirred and that’s on him, on his unreliable sleep schedule and his neediness in the dark quiet aftermath of his dreams.

This is the fourth night in a row he’s seen that same face. He can’t ignore something like that.

It has to  _mean_ something.

So, once he’s caught his breath, he unpeels himself from Melissa, throws on some sleep pants and creeps downstairs to the kitchen of their apartment.

The coffee machine is a little loud, crackling through fresh beans, but it’s too far to disturb Mel and he needs something to do while he holds the phone to his ear, jittering on bare feet.

 _“Harold Prince,”_ the man answers in a business tone.

Robert takes a steadying breath, finger hooked in the handle of his coffee cup as he watches scalding brown liquid stream into it, and says,

“Harold, it’s Robert Fischer. I need your help. I think somebody has extracted information from me.”

.

.

Three days later, Harold Prince arrives in Los Angeles.

.

.

The chime of the door opening is loud.

Nadine Palmer is under her desk, fishing for the pen lid she dropped during the chat with her last client.

“Be right there!” she says, horribly aware that her ass is sticking out as she wriggles around.

She bangs her head trying to get back up, and is smoothing back her sharp ponytail, grumbling, when she sees who it is.

“Danny!” she cries, the sore crown of her head forgotten as she sweeps around her desk.

He’s standing in the middle of the room, looking at her with an expression of such utter loss, she’s reminded of their mother’s funeral.

“Danny, what’s happened?” she asks, clutching his hands. They’re cold and bruised.

And then, he’s sobbing into her shoulder, clutching her blouse and she cups the back of his head and makes bewildered shushing noises that do nothing to quieten his hysteria.

She gets him into a chair, sweeps aside all the travel mags for the Maldives that she’d spent hours going through for Mr and Mrs Ravens, and kneels in front of him.

His eyes are rubbed red, his cheeks are wet.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, still holding his hands very tight, and that reminds her of mom’s funeral, too.

Danny stares at their linked fingers, shuddering into calm, and says,

“He’s not coming back, is he?”

.

.

(At first, she thinks he means their dad, which, fair enough. He hadn’t even come to the bastard’s funeral. It’s probably natural he’d have a break down about it eventually. Only, this seems a little excessive.)

.

.

(He’s not talking about their dad.)

.

.

Once, when Nadine Palmer is thirteen years old, her brother’s late to fetch her from school.

He shows up twenty minutes after everyone else is gone, after she’s already reassured Miss Challice twice that she’ll be  _fine._

He’s got bruises on his face. Tiny ones, although by the time they get home, they’ve doubled in size.

Their dad doesn’t mention anything at dinner.

The next day, Danny gets suspended from school for a week.

Their dad lectures him on fighting with seniors at dinner, only, he’s got this look in his eye the whole time. Like he’s proud or something, even though getting suspended is the kind of thing that stands between Danny and the scholarship to Berkeley he’s already written six practise essays for.

There are no more bruises after that.

.

.

Melissa’s angry when she realises Robert’s been going behind her back about all this and at first, he thinks it’s because she’s angry at him for keeping secrets.

Then he realises, it’s not  _secrets_ she doesn’t like. It’s  _these secrets._ And it’s partly damaged pride, he realises, too, because why wouldn’t he come to her for help, when it’s so obvious she can?

“What department did he work in?” she asks as they heave-ho boxes around his spacious office to clear room for the forest of print outs.

She’s already bought new ink cartridges for the printer.

Her hair is tied up in a pink scrunchie that clashes with her fox blonde colouring, and her expression is reminiscent of tax returns and speedy head sums.

“He was in legal, I think. He was one of the extra lawyers or contractors brought in for the merger when my father was - ill.”

He still stumbles around mentioning his dad.

It’s been over a year since Maurice Fischer died. Fischer-Morrow is a piece of Robert’s past and it’s been months since he met someone who opened a conversation with  _So sorry to hear about Maurice, what a man, what a great man._

They still apologise, sometimes, still offer their condolences, but Robert’s father is no longer the first topic of every conversation a business partner has with him anymore.

They talk  _business_ first, because Robert is the businessman. He is no longer the son of the mogul, he is a man in his own right.

He’s tried to hate himself for feeling good about it.

(It’s never quite stuck, though. The relief, it’s too potent, too all-consuming. He’s relieved, no, actually, he’s  _thrilled.)_

“What if I call Sam? You know, my friend from Chicago. He's still a sketcher. He could do a likeness from a description, see if it helps?”

She's looking at him with that practical grimace, all figures and futures, the face he adores.

Robert kisses her and says,

“Would you? Would that be ok?”

Mel rolls her eyes, slaps his chest.

“Of course, you moron. I'll call him right now if you like.”

.

.

Mel recognises him almost immediately, from the last weeks before Maurice’s death.

 _Steel trap memory,_ she preens when Robert grins with bemusement.

Alex Salter, a legal consultant covering a maternity leave. He was only there for about a week or two, but Mel chatted to him at lunch sometimes and he bought her a coffee once, when he overheard her getting shouted at by an asshole from PR.

 _He was nice,_ she says simply, shrugging with the kind of nonchalance that Robert feels completely incapable of right now.  _Attractive, kind of forgettable._

.

.

Arthur doesn’t tell anyone, not Dom and not Ariadne. Not even his reflection, who is but a stranger these days.

Arthur, he looked Eames in the eyes and said  _I love you_ all of once in all his life.

Three hours later, Eames was dead.

.

.

Arthur doesn’t believe in God.

But if God is real, Arthur thinks he must be the Devil, too.

.

.

Harold Prince flies to Los Angeles and when he gets to Robert Fischer’s house, there’s sweat on his upper lip and a list of probable culprits in his head.

Robert answers the door a little too promptly, his eyes bright with anticipation.

“Harold, come in, come on in,” he says, more boyish than the day they met, years ago.

He scurries his guest inside, shepherding him quickly into a bright living room that smells of coffee and wood polish.

By the time Harold takes seat in an armchair, Robert’s already poured two cups of Columbian roast, splashed some cream into one and is handing it to Harold.

Robert looks good, for all his frantic flurrying.

He’s dressed casually, his hair a little long around his ears and there’s a healthy glow to him that speaks more of California vineyards than central LA offices. There’s a photo on a small side table of a redheaded woman, her face a mask of freckles, and he wonders if she’s got anything to do with it.

(Of course she does, they always do in Harold’s experience.)

Then he looks at the glass coffee table, at the A4 pencil sketch of a familiar looking man’s face.

Mentally adding a new name to the very top of his list, Harold sips his coffee and reaches to pick up the paper.

“What’s this?” he asks.

Robert sits on the arm of the sofa, as if an extra few inches of closeness will help. His own coffee cup is abandoned on the table, probably poured out of habit more than anything else.

“That’s him,” Robert says on a vibrating exhale that matches the tapping of his heels on the hardwood floor. “That’s who I’m seeing in my dreams. Mel has a friend who’s a sketch artist for the police. He did me a favour.”

Harold’s pinched grip on the paper tightens at the word police, then softens, an instinctual trigger that always leaves him nervous, rightly or not.

If he notices, Robert has the good grace not to mention it.

Harold cocks his head to the photo of the woman laughing, eyebrows raised.

The unconscious pull of Robert’s smile is undeniably sweet. Harold tries to dampen his snort of derision.

“Melissa,” Robert says. “She worked for my father’s company. She’s got a knack for faces. Thinks she remembers him - Alex Salter, although I’m sure that’s an alias.”

He says it all very breezily, and if Harold were a crueller man, he’d delight in unpicking the delicate threads of this tapestry Robert’s wearing so uncomfortably.

The pride with which he boasts her talent. The way he clarifies my  _father’s company,_ or the way he throws out the word  _alias_ like he uses it every day like he isn’t terrified of the picture in Harold’s hand.

Harold looks at it again, a little inaccurate in the shape of the face, perhaps, but undeniable.

There’s a sinking in his gut as he sighs loudly.

“You recognise him?” Robert asks, schoolboy eager, like that’ll be all there is to it.

Maybe that’s how Robert honestly thinks this works. He’ll just call the dreamshare police and have the bad man locked up.

Harold’s brow crumples in concern, his pursed lips twisting as he says,

“It looks a hell of a lot like Eames.”

Robert blinks, looking momentarily disappointed, as if he’d hoped to recognise the name.

“So you  _do_ know him?” he asks, recovering quickly as he perks up hopeful, even though

Harold’s certain he hadn’t used an encouraging tone of voice.

Harold hisses through his teeth, looking at the soft, handsome lines of the picture, that have not captured the devilry that he’s beneath.

“If you want to go after Eames,” he says, a bad wolf cautionary tale of his own. “I’ve got two problems for you.”

Robert, unperturbed, hungry. He shuffles closer to the end of the armrest, hunching defensively.

Harold thinks it’s probably futile, warning him.

He tries anyway.

“Look, first off, Eames is a ghost. I could tell you what continents he spends most of his time in, but honestly, it won’t do you any good. If you don’t already know where he is, your chances of finding him are zero.”

He expects a disheartened grumble, maybe a childish scoff of disbelief. Lord knows, Harold’s met plenty of people who seem determined to underestimate the level of criminality in the world around them.

Robert Fischer doesn’t look disheartened, nor does he look disbelieving. He just looks resolved, as if being given an intangible target is something to relish, a challenge unmentionable.

Harold laughs, shaking his head and tossing the portrait of Eames onto the table again.

“Christ,” he scoffs, “And second, he can’t know you’re looking for him. I am not joking, Robert, if he finds out you’re after him, he will carve your heart clean out of your chest. He was a contract killer for Jim Rivers.”

Robert’s blank look, matching his golden face and clean-cut clothes, is frustrating but not exactly unexpected.

“I do not know who that is,” he says, although that’s perfectly obvious.

Harold slides his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes.

“I know very little about Eames, Robert,” Harold says. “He’s an art forger and a dream thief. He’s orchestrated at least one Da Vinci heist and he made his first kill for Jim Rivers when he was  _seventeen_ years old. Do you want to know what he did?”

Robert looks torn by his own lack of answer, so Harold doesn’t bother waiting for one.

“He disabled all the smoke alarms and burned a man’s house down while he was asleep in bed. His wife and son were killed, too. It was ruled a gas leak.”

Robert’s eyes, that baby blue of innocence, stare down at the page on the table with a new lens.

He looks as frightened as he should, now, leaning back a little, arms crossed over his chest.

Harold takes another sip of coffee, smacks his lips together and leans forwards, elbows on his knees.

“Robert, if you want to find him-”

“I do,” he retorts, and it’s honestly quite miraculous, that inbred mixture of anxiety and resolve.

Harold makes an effort not to roll his eyes.

“It will take time. We’ll need to tread extremely lightly.”

Robert juts his chin outwards and Harold wonders if he knows how much he looks like his father when he does that.

“He stole from me,” the younger man says obstinately.

Harold inclines his head delicately.

“We only know that he tried.”

.

.

Harold knows no such thing, of course.

.

.

From the moment Robert called, he had been piecing together timelines and it all fit just a little too perfectly.

He heard the whispers of the impossible job, the rumour that Dom Cobb had finally traversed that map to the El Dorado of dreams.

Dominick Cobb: Extractor and _Inceptor._ Only, everyone seemed pretty fuzzy on the details.

The most popular theory for a while was Haruo Saito was the mark, although rumblings of a few American politicians had cropped up. He heard from more than one waggling tongue that it was the Hong Kong Chief Executive.

Finding that picture on Robert Fischer’s coffee table was all the confirmation Harold needed, because it makes sense.

There’s no way an Extractor would be dumb enough to try pulling off an inception without a Forger, not even an arrogant git like Dom Cobb. And everyone knows Cobb wouldn’t have settled for anything less than the best.

As he checks into his hotel that night, having forcefully declined Robert’s reluctant offer of the guest bedroom, Harold can’t even bring himself to be angry that Cobb broke through the defences he’d built in Robert’s head. He’s too goddamn impressed.

And he's relieved, too. Relieved it’s the Forger’s face Robert recalls, thanks to the son of a bitch’s arrogant belief he could slip through the halls of Fischer-Morrow unnoticed.

Because Harold Prince, he has principles, too. Barbed and few though they are.

If it came down to a choice, to choosing between orphaning a couple of innocent kids who only just got their daddy back last year and taking down a man who’s spent fifteen years stealing and killing for money, well.

It’s not exactly a tough call to make, is it?

.

.

 _How the fuck do you sleep at night?_ Harold’s ex-wife asked as she spilled out his secrets one after another in self-bolstered horror.

 _On my left, Annie, you know that,_ he’d replied.

He’ll never forget the look on her face, nor the sting of her hand on his cheek.

.

.

Falling in love with Arthur happens something like this:

Their third job together. Extracting from a senior pharmaceutical company technician. They’ve been faking study results and the effects, if allowed to progress beyond trial period, might be catastrophic.

It’s a rare, morally righteous piece of art.

Eames forges six test subjects, all of whom were embarrassingly easy to track down.

Arthur runs the data on seven years of studies in less than a week.

At the end of the job, they get drunk in a bar in Soho, the real one, the London one.

Eames counts Arthur’s eyelashes in the indigo shadows on his cheeks and watches him lick his bottom lip every single damn time he takes a pull of his beer.

It’s utterly maddening.

Arthur keeps resting his hand an inch too close to Eames’, like an invitation.

And Eames, he wants to take up the offer, he really does. But also, he wants more than that.

So he doesn’t.

It’s drizzling when they leave. Flecks of rain land on their hair and their faces and Arthur tilts his head up to the black, quivering sky and it takes all the resolve in Eames’ body not to reach out his hand and cup the tender muscles of his throat.

It takes so much resolve, in fact, that he has none left when Arthur returns to looking at him, hooded eyes and pale, smelling of salt and beer.

Eames leans forward and kisses him, quick. Almost too quick for it to be real.

His tongue barely tasting Arthur’s lips before retreating.

Arthur, his mouth wet, half open, looking surprised though not perturbed.

And Eames, embarrassed not that the kiss happened but by the possibility it wasn’t a very good one.

“Night,” he says, even gentler than he means to.

Arthur’s eyes track him all the way down Greek Street, beyond the filtering gloom. Eames can feel it, the weight of a lonely magpie, on a gilded branch.

.

.

_(Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.)_

.

.

“Whatever would I do without you?” Eames asked him, once. Droll thorns, rosebush bravado.

Arthur had probably ignored him or said something glib in response.

Yet the question hadn’t carried much irony. It was weighted with a kind of serenity, a truthfulness rare in criminals, in this criminal.

Arthur hadn’t asked it in return, either, and that was probably out of arrogance, was probably an assumption he’d be more than fine, same as always.

Really, he was right not to ask.

(And in any case, he didn’t ask because the idea was unfathomable. Arthur would never be without Eames.)

.

.

Arthur knows Eames for less than a fifth of his entire lifespan.

It’s inexcusable, he thinks, that those eight years should mean so much more than all the others put together.

.

.

Robert marries Melissa.

.

.

It’s a small ceremony in the little church down the road from where Melissa lived out her childhood in cherry blossom bliss.

Her parents are doting sweethearts and her little brother is a musician. He plays a song he wrote for them as Melissa walks down the aisle.

Robert cries when he sees her, satin sky-blue gown and white ribbons in her hair.

Henry, his oldest childhood friend, is his best man and he gives a terrible, wonderful speech at the reception, which takes place in the fields behind her parents’ house.

 _This is family,_ he knows, now, to see these cheerful faces. Cheerful for him, for her, for  _them._

Robert feels this happiness keenly, and when they dance together with brazen, double left foot confidence, tripping each other up and tangling each other in spins, he is happier than he has ever known.

.

.

 _(I am so proud of you,_ Melissa says, and Robert tells her,  _It’s all you.)_

.

.

On a Thursday, fog on the horizon, as the season speeds ever towards winter with rotten leaf momentum, Robert answers the phone as he eats marmalade toast in bed, a coffee in his hand and Melissa curled into his side, stealing bites as she reads her book.

The phone rings for almost a minute before he answers,

“Yes?”

Melissa’s head is on his thigh, her weight a comfort.

 _“It’s done,”_ Harold Prince says.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr Prince,” Robert says.

Then he puts the phone down, drains his coffee and gives Mel the last of his toast.

There’s something in his chest, champagne bubbles and nausea.

“Everything ok?” Melissa asks without looking away from her book.

Robert leans down to kiss her temple.

She’s butter perfume soft and cat purr strong.

“Yes,” he whispers into her hair. “Everything is fine.”

.

.

Six thousand miles away, seventeen firefighters tackle a blaze that destroys an entire warehouse in Kaunas.

Inside, they will find nine corpses, charred into nothingness.

.

.

Robert and Melissa spend the day in bed, dirty sheets and kiss bruised mouths.

.

.

In three days, he will ask her to marry him.

She will say yes before he’s finished speaking.

.

.

And one day, later, much later.

Melissa will take his hands in hers and say, solemn as their wedding vows,  _Who was that?_

Robert will tell her  _Nobody,_ and that will be a lie.

.

.

Eames catches on in New York.

Albany, to be precise.

He detours West through Pennsylvania, lays a trap in Harrisburg but the bait’s not enticing enough.

He’s good off grid. He blends in with drug addicts and murderers, being both himself.

Arthur calls to ask what he’s doing in the States, and Eames tells him,  _Meeting Saito, darling, why, are you jealous?_

Which is mostly true. He  _is_ meeting Saito. In three weeks, provided he shakes his heel-clutcher by then.

The man following him is called Lindon, that much he knows.

Lindon is an unknown and Eames is nervous about letting him get too close, lest overconfidence seize him the way it has done before. It’s a shame he can’t tell Arthur about this, really, because Arthur would probably be proud of him for his restraint.

He stays in motels that cut even below his usual standards and he squirrels through New Jersey with his foot on the pedal and his eyes out for Arthur’s long abandoned childhood.  
Lindon dies badly.

At first it seems like he’s a faithful little fuckwit, but more and more Eames realises he probably just doesn’t actually know anything.

Whoever’s behind this, they’re clever enough to maintain their six degrees of separation.  
Eames dumps Lindon in the Raritan at three in the morning, the clumping splash, bloated limbs and mangled organs.

He drives back to New York slower, the city this time, the sleepless cesspool that puts London to shame.

He drives with his hands at four and seven, lax and lazy. Confirms check-in with Saito and sends Arthur a photograph of the MoMA with the words, _For your birthday?_ Underneath.

All Eames knows is this: somebody is coming for him.

And this: he might be dead soon.

.

.

Robert learns, later, the price of his own pride.

It will happen unexpectedly. It will churn him like cream in a pail.

He will not regret it, but he won’t be so hasty to play wrathful God ever again.

.

.

Arthur comes to on Yusuf’s kitchen floor with his head pounding and his guts trembling.

He’s in the recovery position and Yusuf is sitting beside him, legs crossed, watching him sternly with an owlish look of medical mistrust.

Arthur’s mouth wobbles around incoherent vowels, a whistling rustle of sounds until Yusuf interrupts brusquely.

“Not for long. A minute fifty. I’d have done something after four minutes.”

This is neither a comfort nor a concern.

Arthur blinks fuzzily, eyes on Yusuf’s knees and his throat burning.

When he starts to sit up, his forehead protests violently and Yusuf eases him back down,

sliding a puffy orange chair cushion under his head.

“Probably not a concussion, but there’s no sense in being hasty,” he says with lethargy in Arthur’s limbs, an exhaustion that doesn’t come from injury.

The kitchen is warm, smells of alkaline, brewing tea. There’s a cup of ice water near his head that he doesn’t bother reaching for.

It comes back to him with abstract slowness, the flicker of film reels melting in the projector.

The rage and the terror muted by the sharp throbbing above his temple. He can’t feel blood or bandaging, but the bruise will be phenomenal.

A gasping curl of noise escapes the back of his throat. Arthur tries his best to contain it, to re-forge those shapeless vowels into words and what comes out tumbles in a series of hitches.

“I always thought, he probably knew,” he says, tentative, ever so quiet.

Yusuf tilts towards him looking impassive, but for the turmoil in his eyes.

“I don’t know why…” Arthur closes his eyes again, choking on the wave of sickness, that forceful tide he has swept back until now with only a broom of self-recriminating denial. “If I hadn’t gone with him.”

It hangs, mist and smoke above them. Arthur curves into the cushion beneath his head. He can’t say it, he mustn’t, because then it will be real. It will be valid, a working theory, a devastating one.

So instead he glances up at Yusuf’s grim expression and asks,

“How did you figure it out?”

Yusuf’s eyes, dog pity and chocolate soft. Ashamed of his own cleverness.

“Chance and guesswork,” he says apologetically. “It was too much of a coincidence, Sheridan needing you for that job, and them not finishing you off after you got away. Whoever was after him knew you were better protected than Eames.”

Arthur feels his face crumpling, the squeezing dismay pressing his mouth downwards and his eyes closed. He puts his hands over his face, though there’s nothing left to hide.

He flinches briefly when Yusuf’s hand finds his upper arm. His grip is solid, unquestionable.

His voice, decisive when he speaks, when he says,

“Arthur, maybe they found you in Lithuania because you were there. Maybe if you hadn’t gone, Eames would have lived.”

A raw, animal sound tears out of Arthur, just once, quickly swallowed back up. His fingers are digging into the rapid swelling goose egg on his head and his stomach muscles tense as he curls tighter.

Yusuf’s hand tightens on his arm, too.

“But I honestly think they’d have found him anyway,” he continues, and there’s no waver of doubt. He has no reason to lie, not about this and Arthur knows it. “So in all likelihood, Eames would still have died. He’d just have done it alone.”

Arthur stares blearily into the dark of his shielding palms. He feels the urge to shy from that, like a hand on a long-healed scar. The pain is absent, only a phantom thought that it  _should_ hurt, followed swiftly by relief to realise it doesn’t anymore.

Eames could have died alone in a basement in Russia seven years ago, Arthur knows, only he didn’t. He could have died so many times and Arthur’s never been so grateful he didn’t, not until now.

He thinks about the car journey to Lima, Eames sallow-skinned in that stupid hooded sweater, snarling,  _Have you always been so self-pitying?_

Without warning, a soggy laugh bursts out of Arthur’s mouth, caught by his palms.

Christ, Eames would have had a field day if he’d ever seen Arthur like this.

For all he’d have relished the undivided attention Arthur has been affording Eames’ ghost for the past three years, he never enjoyed making Arthur cry.

He sits up abruptly, too abruptly. Cloudy head rush and scree scramble in his stomach. Yusuf pulls back awkwardly and seems to brace himself for another meltdown.

Arthur only laughs again, wipes his dry cheeks distractedly and says,

“Maybe I should kill Fischer.”

Yusuf’s eyebrows rise comically high at that and he actually glances at Arthur’s bruised head, like he’s worried about brain damage.

Then he shrugs innocently and says, quite simply, “If you think it will make you feel better.”  
Arthur smiles weakly.

“I’m not sure it will,” he says, picking up his ice water with both hands and sipping slowly. “I won’t know until I try, though.”

Yusuf barks, amused and defeated.

“Then be my guest, Arthur.”

.

.

This time, he doesn’t call Cobb.

.

.

Robert Fischer dies twelve years after his father, leaving behind an adoring wife, a gentle-hearted son and two infant daughters.

.

.

Early-onset Alzheimer's.

There was nothing they could do.

.

.

_(And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.)_

.

.

They get to Igoumenitsa in the fresh breeze of dawn. The sun, wielding her beams like blades, even as the sandy shore slowly warms under the Ionian Sea’s cresting strikes.

Eames grumbles as he rolls purposefully over in the stupidly tiny cot. Arthur, squashed beneath his bulk, makes a sleepy, obliged protest.

“Dead, dead, dead,” he wheezes as Eames sits up a little, his forearm pressed across Arthur’s upper chest.

He pouts in false concern, staring down at Arthur beneath him.

“Oh, sorry darling, did you need something?”

Arthur presses Eames’ face away with his hands, making a slightly more than token effort to dislodge his immoveable form.

“Fuck you,” he splutters, even as a smile breaks through his scornful refusal.

“Fuck me?” Eames asks with a lascivious grin of such menace, Arthur blushes. “No, dear. I think, this time, it’s fuck  _you._ Wouldn’t you agree?”

Even as he grinds down into Arthur’s splayed legs, Arthur laughs and glowers and keeps pushing, just enough to give Eames a taste of his own goddamn medicine.

Eames kisses him, kisses right over his grumpy groaning while his free hand is tickling down Arthur’s sides, hot lava traces and Arthur’s breathless, that pinning weight, pressing and pouring and -

Eames pushes up onto his knees, gives a little coughing smirk and says,

“Gosh, I’m famished,” in his most obscenely English voice. “Breakfast, darling?”

“Eames,” Arthur says in a puppyish, threatening tone, reaching to grab his hips but Eames swings his legs away too quick and his entire wonderful weight is gone.

He clicks his shoulders even as Arthur tries to grapple him back.

“Eames, I swear to God -”

“Oh, I’m an atheist, dear,” he replies blithely. “And I really am hungry.”

Despite Arthur’s best efforts, he gets his underwear on with minimal fuss and is soon laughing at Arthur’s belligerent frustration.

“Put your clothes on, Arthur,” he says. “I’m sure we’ll find an ancient temple of Aphrodite soon enough that we can desecrate.”

Arthur stares up at him with accusatory horror.

“You’re a heathen,” he says. “And actual heathen.”

Eames’ eyes are colourful and his mouth is dark pink, upturned. Cheeks red and hair in disarray, the clink of his belt as he buckles it.

“Bothers your altar boy sensibilities, does it?” he chuckles as Arthur kicks the sheet off the bed distractedly. “Oh go on, Arthur, you’ve never had a quickie in a church before?”

“Of  _course_ I haven’t!” Arthur insists, unsure why exactly he feels quite so scandalised as he watches Eames button up his shirt.

Eames shrugs, making a throaty, concerned sound.

“That’s too bad,” he says, sounding positively  _morose._

Arthur narrows his eyes.

“You have not,” he says with all the confidence he can fake.

When Eames raises his eyebrows as if to say,  _haven’t I?_ Arthur’s mouth drops open.

“No, you can’t - that’s - you -”

“Ok, ok,” Eames concedes, toeing on his shoes and throwing Arthur’s shirt at him. “It was just blowjobs, but still -”

“Oh my  _God,_ I can’t look at you right now,” Arthur scoffs, and Eames’ barking laughter shifts up a few octaves. “Go find us breakfast while I re-evaluate everything. A church? Go, now. You child of Satan.”

Eames leaves, still laughing, all promises and taunts, blowing Arthur a kiss at the cabin door and just as it swings shut, he reminds Arthur,

“Jesus loved a good hooker, don’t you know?”

Arthur laughs despite himself, glances around the room and spots Eames’ wallet on the tiny cupboard space next to the cot.

Rolling his eyes, Arthur gets dressed hurriedly and picks it up on his way out, flipping it in his hands.

Inside the coin pouch, there’s a poker chip, two euro coins and a necklace chain, on which hangs a thin silver crucifix. On the back, at the centre point of the cross, an engraved looping script of the letter  _E._

.

.

He will find that same looping  _E,_ later, in an India marble gravestone in Cambridge.

He’ll think, then, he knows when Eames turned into this vehement disbeliever.

(He’ll be right.)

.

.

Harold Prince returns to Los Angeles several months into their quest for retribution, just as Robert is starting to regret having anything to do with dream-share at all.

He’s tried to put it out of his mind. Sometimes he’s managed to go as long as a week or more without thinking about it.

It always creeps back though, like shadows crawling away from the setting of the sun. He can’t shake the dread that wraps around him, every time that happens.

The idea of it is enough to leave him sleepless, the violation of it. He hasn’t explained it to Melissa, not in any detail.

He can’t, can’t put into words the horrible feeling, knowing his mind has been invaded, that is bears fingerprints of someone else.

When Harold shows up at the office on an unexpected Monday, Robert is momentarily gripped with fear. Then he sees the triumph in Harold’s eyes, the smug preen of his stance.

“I’ve found our solution,” he says with feathery peacock pride and proceeds to drop two enlarged printouts of CCTV camera images.

They are of a young man wearing a neat, corporate suit, his dark hair tidied back out of his youthful face.

“Him?” Robert asks with a measure of disbelief. “He can find Eames?”

Robert frowns at the images, and at Harold’s odd, squirrelly laugh.

“Oh, he knows where Eames is already. That’s his  _boyfriend.”_

Harold’s tone of voice makes it perfectly clear what he thinks of  _that,_ however Robert has neither the time for Harold’s bigotry, nor the patience to confront it. He makes a neutral, cautious sound, picking up one of the photos to peruse it.

“We’re going after his partner?”

It’s difficult not to think of Melissa, then. Not to imagine her going about her day, all the while being watched and followed, being targeted, just for being Robert’s girlfriend.

“Not exactly,” Harold says unhelpfully.

“I don’t want innocent people getting caught in the crossfire,” he says, dropping the photo with hasty dismissal.

Harold takes a seat opposite Robert, and once again nudges the photos at him.

“Trust me, Robert. Arthur is far from  _innocent._ To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if he worked with Eames to extract from you.”

Robert’s eyebrows raise at that. For some reason, he finds it harder to imagine this man, this  _Arthur,_ as a criminal.

Harold crosses an ankle over his knee and sits back in his chair, cat-cream leisurely.

“No,” he says, whistling through his teeth. “It’s simply that Arthur’s too smart to be a target. He’s done jobs pro-bono for career politicians for _years._ That kid is protected, you shouldn’t touch him.”

Robert considers the photo again, wonders to himself if Arthur knows what kind of man he’s fallen in love with, if he’s even fallen in love at all, or perhaps just thinks he has. He’d hardly be the first to be blinded by a con-man’s charms.

“He knows where Eames is,” he says, reluctance and the roaring thunder of distant hope stirring in his fingertips.

“He knows where Eames is,” Harold concurs, grinning broadly. “And it just so happens he pissed off Cobol Engineering a couple of years back. It turns out, they’ve been keeping tabs on him, just in case he gets cut loose from his protective shell.”

Robert knows Cobol Engineering. They’re ruthless and innovative and quite frankly the least surprising people to be caught up in a world of secret-stealing.

He nods, despite his reservations, a half-smile tugging at his expression.

“This is good,” he says, amber light flickering to green.

“This is good,” Harold agrees. “Just sit tight, Robert. We’re getting close.”

.

.

On a Saturday, in a city elsewhere, Eames kissed the hollow between Arthur’s shoulder blades. Nipped the skin stretched over his ribs and held him anchor fast at the wrists.

“Stay, stay here, stay now,” Arthur whimpered in to the pillow and Eames laughed, a little unkind, a little too pleased.

(But he stayed, all the same. Stayed there, stayed then.)

.

.

Dom calls Arthur, leaves voicemails he’d never have dared to before.

Voicemails that use a name he hasn’t used in years, had squashed so far out of conscious reach that he’s surprised it finds his mouth at all.

_Daniel, don’t do this. This isn’t you. You aren’t thinking. Do you understand? Please. This isn’t you._

.

.

Saito won’t return his calls, either.

.

.

 _You couldn’t kill a man in reality,_ Eames had said.

Had sounded so distant, so affectionate, so brutally truthful.

Then, three weeks later, Arthur shot an unarmed police detective in the face, and Arthur discovered Eames was wrong, he  _could_ kill a man.

He was right, too, though. The guilt, it crippled Arthur. He never forgot that spray of dark blood on the rainy pavement.

.

.

Ariadne marries Jacob.

.

.

Arthur dances with her at the reception, young Mrs Herveau.

He’d never thought she was one to take a new name, Warren had suited her so well.

She’s all creme and gold, all satin and savoury.

She sparkles, this bright thing, she is so undeniably happy. She clutches his hand exam pen tight and Arthur guides her through the other dancing couples the way he guided her through her early days of dreaming.

There’s something in her eyes that speaks of a sadness that is not hers.

He thinks she might apologise, now. Apologise for things she doesn’t understand.

Because she is a good woman in love with a good man.

And Arthur, he’s not  _good,_ not inherently, and he’s never loved a good man, wouldn't know how to.

“There was nothing you could do,” he tells her; spins her into Jacob’s hands before she can apologise anyway.

Across the room, Dom nods at him with that patronising, paternal pride that Arthur wishes to God didn’t make him feel so much better.

Champagne light and Cuban heel taps, the band croons and the wine pours and Arthur feels a little cold to look at it all, to remember the look in his thirteen year old sister’s eye when she announced she was never getting married, so he probably should, just to please their dad.

Phillipa’s sitting at their table, wearing a stoic mask of boredom to hide her early teen self-consciousness.

Arthur asks her for a dance and her face lights up with glee that has that same Mallorie shine to it as her laughter. She’s as bad at dancing as her father and as brazenly enthusiastic as her mother.

“I’m glad you’re here, Uncle Arthur,” Phillipa says.

“Me too,” he replies, looking down at her freckled smile, the mascara on her eyes too heavy for such a young face, her relief so knowingly naive.

He’s surprised to realise it’s not a lie.

.

.

Yusuf makes him stay for almost a week, which seems excessive, until on day four when Arthur sprains his wrist tearing himself out of a nightmare and he thinks, maybe, Yusuf knows a thing or two.

So he waits, stews and brews in the blister pop of North African September, until he’s ready.

Then he flies from Mombasa to Paris. To the apartment he loathes and covets as deeply as the painting that hangs above their bed.

(He doesn’t know why he still thinks of it as  _theirs.)_

.

.

He wasn’t well versed in sentiment until Eames kissed him with an open-mouthed smile and said,  _Darling, I think I’m a little bit in love with you._

.

.

He boxes it all up, the books and the clothes and the paints and the stupid fridge magnets from their best and worst jobs.

Labels them accordingly then drops a key through Mr and Mrs Herveau’s letterbox, along with a note that reads,

_Keep what you want. A._

He knows Ariadne will make better use of it all anyway.

He wouldn’t have a clue what to do with that much charcoal.

.

.

He’s never checked up on the Manchester apartment. That godawful sofa where Arthur was laid up for the better part of a month, while Eames hummed Stevie Wonder songs and rented stupid slasher movies and cooked everything with too much coriander.

He doesn’t consider going back, not even for a moment.

It is a forgotten sanctuary, and Arthur, he’s many things, but he isn’t a fucking masochist.

.

.

He goes to Cusco, and he apologises to a man he thought was dead.

.

.

 _You couldn’t kill a man in reality,_ Eames said, and they both thought Arthur proved him wrong, but he didn’t.

.

.

Robert Fischer calls his son Aaron, and Melissa pretends to argue with the choice for all of five seconds.

She says,  _This is your Daddy, Aaron. He’ll always keep you safe._

.

.

He thinks about the time he’s borrowing, thinks about that way Death stared at him with a gentle face and dark brown eyes and told him,

“I want to kill you, but I just don’t think you deserve it.”

.

.

_(I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.)_

.

.

On a Wednesday, Dom gets a call from Phillipa’s school to say she’s in serious trouble, and would he please come down at his earliest convenience?

He risks multiple speeding tickets and he gets there in record time and he sees her, a bruise on her chin and her arms folded tight across her chest and she looks so much like her mother he feels more relief than anything else.

The Principal is furious and there’s a girl with a broken nose and neither of them are admitting to anything and Dom looks at his darling daughter and she looks right back at him.

In the car on the way home he says,

“Shall we get some ice cream?”

She glowers at him with cloudy suspicion.

“Aren’t you going to ground me?” she demands with her blue and purple chin stuck out.

Dom raises his eyebrows, flicks on the indicator and heads into town anyway. He deserves some goddamn ice cream, even if his kid doesn’t.

“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?” he asks coolly.

“Olivia’s a bitch anyway,” Phillipa snarls flippantly.

“Less of the foul language, sweetheart,” Dom says, pulling up at a red light and determinedly staring out of the windscreen even as his daughter glares at him.

“You don’t mind me punching her in the face, but I can’t call her names?” she spits, sounding furious.

Dom smiles despite himself.

“Phillipa, I’ve never known you to do anything without reason, so I am assuming Olivia did or said something terrible to provoke that kind of reaction from you. There’s simply no reason to stoop to name calling.”

Phillipa huffs loudly and puts both feet up on the dashboard, clearly just to be told to put them down.

“That’s stupid, you’re being stupid,” she says hotly, her voice shaking now.

“Feet down, Phillie,” Dom says quietly, and he can see her shivering as her seething rage fills the car, swarming them like ants.

“You can’t - stop being - it’s not my fault!” she yells, kicks the car with her heel hard enough to crunch and lets out something close to a scream, something hurting and animal that strangles into a sob as she buries her face in her hands.

Dom reaches with one hand to her arm and she shoves it away, curling towards the window.

He returns it to the steering wheel reluctantly, lets her choke out her tears, hiding from his stare. It’s more painful than he can fully appreciate, hearing his child cry.

He’d thought the worst had been to hear her whimpering through the telephone, when he was far out of reach. It’s only in moments like these he realises there was something easier about it, because he could direct his anger at the distance between them. He could blame his inability to make it better on the fact he was so far away.

Now, there’s barely half a metre between them and he still can’t do anything.

“I hate you!” she shouts into her palms and that hurts, too, but not because he believes it, or because he really thinks  _she_ believes it.

It hurts because that word comes so easily to his child, in a way it never came to himself, or to her mother. She learned hatred without either of them and of everything he ever wanted to protect her from, death and sadness and injury and disappointment, hatred is maybe the one he wishes most he could have shielded her from.

Dom pulls into the parking lot, distracted and anxious. Turns off the engine and reaches with both hands this time.

She fights him, cat scratch wriggling. He just pulls until she gives in, until she’s gripping his shirt and crying openly into his neck and shuddering.

“I don’t want ice cream,” she says with a gipping cry and Dom nods, kissing the crown of her head.

“I want  _Mom,”_ she says, and Dom isn’t surprised, not one tiny bit.

“Me too,” he whispers as quietly as he can, as gently as he can, but it rips another sob out of her all the same.

She pushes closer, knees curled up on the seat beneath her.

“I’m s-sorry,” she whimpers, more than once.

Dom shushes her, strokes her head and her back.

“It’s OK,” he says. “I know. I know.”

He remembers the day she was born, like the snap of a photograph reel. Stark images of Mal’s sweaty face and the bite of her lips and the midwife that smiled so confidently at him, full of promises that she kept faithfully.

Phillipa cries until she runs out of breath, and out of tears. Until she’s limp in her father’s arms and fiddling absently with the buttoned collar of his shirt.

He kisses her forehead and she pulls back, rubbing her flushed face and her mouth.

Her shoulders are hunched and she hugs her knees, embarrassed.

When it’s clear she can’t quite bring herself to say it, Dom does for her.

He unclicks his seatbelt, which has bitten horribly into his neck from leaning towards her, and suggests,

“Double chocolate and strawberry?”

Her smile wobbles and she snorts.

“Yeah,” she says, brushing more tears away and tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Sure thing,” he says. “Come on, Raging Bull. Let’s go.”

“Oh my  _God,_ dad,” she scorns, laughing weakly as she clambers out of the car.

Dom winks at her, grinning, and she gives him one more hug, a hurried  _Thanks_ whispered so quickly it’s little more than a nudge of sound between them.

It's enough.

.

.

Dom leaves voicemails and keeps an eye on the news.

He invites Ariadne and her husband for Thanksgiving and they accept gratefully, stay in the guest room for four days and the absence that stands amongst them like a ghost is more present than any one person.

.

.

In California, in September, before the end scrunches up paper ball and torn.

Eames on those hotel sheets full of embarrassment and fear, Arthur sitting at the foot of the bed feeling foolish and guilty.

“I’m sorry,” Eames mutters into a pillow and Arthur lets out a tiny laugh that he really shouldn’t.

“Jesus Eames, stop it,” he says, and it comes out harsh, comes out angry, and maybe that’s good, because Eames laughs too.

.

.

They get there, in the end.

.

.

Arthur doesn’t plan it. He steps off the plane without luggage and he knows which office to go to.

It’s late when he gets there, and it’s late that he stays, day after day, for a week.

Then he makes use of every skill he ever learned about being an easy thief. Grabs the right pass card and shakes the right hands and memorises the right exits.

Lets himself in on a Thursday night, dark skies and empty offices.

Robert Fischer looks up from his desk and freezes, like the electric hum of copper wires.

Arthur stares back at him from the doorway and feels a thousand years of hatred unfathomable.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks and Robert Fischer nods.

On his left hand, a wedding ring, and on his desk tilted just too far to see, a photo frame.

Arthur licks his lips, hand loose around his gun, the other in his pocket, gripping a small red die.

He steps into the room and is pleased when Robert doesn’t ask something too stupid, like how he got in, or how he knew.

.

.

 _You couldn’t kill a man in reality,_ Eames told Arthur, once.

 _Do you really think I couldn’t?_ Arthur asked in return.

.

.

Arthur stares at the face of a man he’s supposed to hate and feels a sad, wretched longing.

.

.

 _I hope you never find out,_ Eames said in return, in that bar in South America, half out of his mind and never more full of sincerity than in that moment.

.

.

Arthur holsters his gun. Takes a seat on the other side of that wide, worrisome desk and looks into the pale blue eyes of Robert Fischer, terrified and troublesome.

“Did it make you feel better?” he asks.

Fischer’s mouth twitches, half downwards, less than a grimace.

“I don’t know if killing you will make  _me_ feel better,” Arthur says honestly.

There’s sweat on Fischer’s upper lip. His hands are flat on the table.

“I want to kill you,” Arthur says, the same way he once told Eames he wanted him to stop talking, for once in his goddamn life. “But I just don’t think you deserve it.”

“What was it you stole from me?” Fischer asks, and to Arthur’s surprise his voice doesn’t tremble.

It seems like a surprise to Fischer, too.

Arthur frowns, cocks his head, and the blossom of realisation is so acutely painful it takes a moment to fully penetrate the white noise of everything else. He laughs, open throat ridicule, and shakes his head.

“Not a single goddamn thing,” he says and stands up.

He stands and turns away, a half step then back again, looks down at Robert Fischer, with his frightened eyes and his confusion.

It makes him laugh again, a real sound, loud and sad and hysterical, like the sound he made standing in his sister’s shop, as she hugged him with dazed love and told him it would all be OK.

“You killed the wrong man,” he says, incredibly quietly, and he laughs again, shaking his head. “You don’t even know.”

Robert opens his mouth, but Arthur gets there first, like a race, rabbit heart and wronged.

“You win,” he says aloud to a man who can’t hear him. “I hate it when you’re right.”

Then he turns and sees, outside the door, a woman. Her hair is red, and her eyes are big and her belly is a little rounded beneath a snugly fit sweater that’s probably supposed to make the life inside her as obvious as possible.

Arthur, cold as spring rain, nods his head at her, and at Robert Fischer.

“Congratulations, Mr Fischer,” he says, then, stopping at the silent woman he tilts his head again in a slightly mocking hat tip. “Mrs Fischer.”

He hears the woman ask, before he’s left,  _Who was that?_

He doesn’t hear Fischer’s reply.

.

.

_(Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you. If I go first, I’ll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters.)_

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: Are you running late? Did you sleep too much? All the awful dreams felt real enough. ~ Dark Rooms, I Get Overwhelmed
> 
> For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky. ~ Ted Chiang, Tower of Babylon
> 
> I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see. ~ William Blake
> 
> Into this wild Abyss, The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave. ~ John Milton, Paradise Lost
> 
> Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. ~ C. S. Lewis
> 
> And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget. ~ Christina Rossetti, When I Am Dead, My Dearest
> 
> I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. ~ Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
> 
> Why should I be afraid to die? I belong to you. If I go first, I’ll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters. ~ Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line


End file.
